The European Union's Summit on the Eastern Partnership, held May 21-22 in Riga, was a disaster for Ukraine. For friends of democracy, the rule of law, and Ukraine, it would have been better had this EU summit never taken place and its joint declaration never written.

This summit was expected to be a major embarrassment for the EU, delivering nothing in terms of European perspectives, financial support for Ukraine, freer trade for all, or freer travel. But the outcome was even worse than expected. The Riga gathering backtracked from the elevated Vilnius summit in November 2013, which sparked Ukraine's Euromaidan.

The thirteen-page joint declaration by the twenty-eight EU heads of state, and representatives of the six Eastern Partnership countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine) reads like a successful sting operation by the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Twenty of the thirty paragraphs contain no substance and would have been better left out, while the remaining ten are nothing short of disastrous....................